Mastodawn

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Filip Obradovic will present the wild architecture of TonicDB. It runs directly on hardware without an OS via a shim layer / unikernel. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-tonicdb-filip-obradovic/

TonicDB: Databases without an OS? Meet QuinineHM (Filip Obradovic) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

We spent years optimizing database internals, only to have our performance eaten... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Andy Pavlo Mar 16

CMU Database Group Mar 16

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Hari Krishna Sunder will present the architecture of the YugabyteDB distributed DBMS based on Postgres. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-yugabytedb-hari-krishna-sunder/

YugabyteDB: Distributed PostgreSQL for Modern Apps (Hari Krishna Sunder) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

YugabyteDB is an AI-ready, multimodal, distributed PostgreSQL database. It effectively bridges the... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Andy Pavlo Mar 9

CMU Database Group Mar 9

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Simon Eskildsen will present the architecture of the turbopuffer search engine. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-turbopuffer-simon-eskildsen/

turbopuffer: Object Storage-native Database for Search (Simon Eskildsen) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

turbopuffer is an object storage-native search engine. It puffs data into a... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Andy Pavlo Feb 16

CMU Database Group Feb 16

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marek Galovic will present the TopK document + vector search engine. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-topk-marek-galovic/

TopK: Billion-Scale Hybrid Retrieval from the Ground Up (Marek Galovic) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

TopK is a search engine built from the ground up for unstructured... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Andy Pavlo Feb 9

CMU Database Group Feb 9

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marc Brooker will present the architecture of Amazon's Aurora DSQL Postgres-compatible serverless OLTP DBMS. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-aurora-dsql-marc-brooker/

Aurora DSQL: Serverless, Scalable, Global OLTP (Marc Brooker) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Amazon Aurora DSQL is a distributed SQL database, designed to make it... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Andy Pavlo Feb 2

CMU Database Group Feb 2

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Tyler Akidau + Adam Symanski will present the architecture of Redpanda's Oxla database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-redpanda-oxla-tyler-akidau-adam-symanski/

Redpanda Oxla or: Why Your Hashmaps are Secretly Wrecking Your Performance (Tyler Akidau + Adam Symanski) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

In this talk, we’ll first give an overview of the Oxla analytical... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Andy Pavlo Jan 30

Spring 2026 @CMUDB Seminar Series: PostgreSQL vs. The World → https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/spring2026/

Starting Mon Feb 2nd @ 4:30pm EST over Zoom. We will alternate between a speaker from either a Postgres DBMS or a non-Postgres DBMS. Open to the public. Videos available on YouTube afterwards.

SCHEDULE
‣ Feb 2: Redpanda Oxla
‣ Feb 9: Amazon Aurora DSQL
‣ Feb 16: TopK
‣ Feb 23: Microsoft Azure HorizonDB
‣ Mar 9: turbopuffer
‣ Mar 16: YugabyteDB
‣ Mar 23: TonicDB
‣ Mar 30: PixelTable
‣ Apr 6: SpacetimeDB
‣ Apr 13: Supabase Multigres
‣ Apr 20: VillageSQL

Andy Pavlo Jan 5

Here is my latest article on the world of databases: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-retrospective.html

All the hot topics from the last year:
• More Postgres action!
• MCP for everyone!
• MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB!
• File formats!
• Market movements!
• The richest person in the world!

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.

Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University

Andy Pavlo Dec 17

Congratulations to the #1 ranked @CMUDB PhD student Wan Shen Lim for successfully passing his doctoral defense. Wan has been working on hard AF database research with me for the last *nine* years (undergrad+grad) at CMU. He also hates chickens.

Andy Pavlo Dec 8

CMU Database Group Dec 8

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jark Wu from AlibabaCloud will present an overview of Apache Fluss. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/future-data-apache-fluss-a-streaming-storage-for-real-time-lakehouse/

[Future Data] Apache Fluss: A Streaming Storage for Real-Time Lakehouse - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Modern data lakehouses promise unified batch and streaming processing, yet their storage... Read More +

Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Homepage	https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/
Twitter	https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo
Github	https://github.com/apavlo/